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One thing that happens in a new relationship is that you start getting confused about who gets credit for what.

Was I this good a salsa dancer with my ex?

He (or she) totally cries during This Is Us, just like I do!

Did I always like shrimp and grits, or does new bae just cook them better than Grandma did?

In the real world, your friends who’ve known you will set the record straight: You were never a good salsa dancer and still aren’t. You said the same thing when you and your ex watched the first season of Being Mary Jane, and you’ve always liked grits; you literally have a Groupon for Quaker Oats.

When it comes to politics, unlike relationships, cause and effect aren’t so clear. Did 9/11 happen because President George W. Bush screwed up or because President Bill Clinton didn’t kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance? Did President Barack Obama have a weak economic recovery, or did Bush run out the back door, leaving him a dumpster fire?

Now that America is in a new relationship with a married man, President Donald Trump (it’s not his first time), we are again trying to figure out who deserves credit for what. African-American unemployment numbers are historically low in Trump’s first few months in office, but is that because Obama’s economy is still humming along, or did Trump somehow accidentally, not on purpose, manage to do something good for black America? The numbers suggest that it might be a little bit of both.

Starting this spring into the summer, African-American unemployment under Trump dropped to the lowest levels in almost 20 years. As of the end of July, the black-vs.-white employment gap is the smallest it’s been since April 2000, back when “Say My Name” was a new song, Dave Chappelle was just a skinny kid “Killing Them Softly,” and BlackPlanet.com was peak social media. Mind you, the 7.4 percent black unemployment rate is still higher than the 3.8 percent white unemployment rate, but considering how bad things were throughout most of the Great Recession, this is good news.

If you’re not tired of Trump winning yet, consider that in the first six months of his presidency, unemployment levels in major cities like Cleveland, Baltimore and Chicago went down, which tends to indicate that black people in large population centers are finding work. Most important, black gains in employment have tended to be in areas like nursing, home health care and transportation, which are professions less likely to shrink in the future, as opposed to construction and farming jobs, which are continuing to decline across the country.

So does this mean that campaign-trail Trump was right all along? Black folks had nothing to lose by voting for him? That Trump, with the help of Ben Carson and Omarosa, is saving African Americans from devastation and despair? Can Donald Trump really take credit for all this magical economic change occurring around the nation for black folks?

Not really.

Trump taking credit for this economy is akin to a man bragging that his mediocre back rubs loosened up your shoulders, when your ex taught you yoga, was certified in Reiki and worked at Massage Envy. Trump isn’t necessarily screwing anything up, but this situation was already popping long before he showed up.

African-American unemployment was at 7.7 percent when Obama left office in January, a downward trend that had been moving along for the better part of 2016. Most economists would argue that no president really “owns” the economy until a good 12-18 months into his (or her) first term. Prior to that, you’re just managing what the last person left you.

President Ronald Reagan and Obama inherited horrible recessions, while Bush and Trump inherited growing economies. Further weakening the argument for Trump’s taking credit for low black unemployment is that this administration hasn’t passed any major legislation that would supposedly boost the economy—no tax reform, no infrastructure bills. Without any substantive economic legislative action, this presidency has more or less been along for the ride in a car Obama bought and put gas in.

Trump supporters would counter that rolling back regulations on business has made American companies more bullish about hiring, an argument that has some merit but remains a double-edged sword when you look at the entirety of the Trump administration. While Trump may have “unshackled” businesses by working to repeal pesky requirements that businesses not pollute our water, or that retirement homes not scam senior citizens or allow them to be sexually assaulted, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has also been busy. The Department of Justice will be scaling back or downright ignoring many cases of racial discrimination against minorities in the workplace in favor of protecting disadvantaged white males, a new policy direction that will certainly harm African-American chances for employment, advancement and training.

The fact that Trump is attempting to take credit for an Obama economy that he trashed just a few months ago should come as no surprise to anyone who’s watched this man’s behavior over the last two years. Trump will continue to show up to black America, claiming that we’ve never had it this good, at least as long as it suits him. Eventually the Obama effect is going to wear off, and Trump will have to stand on his own economic relationship with black America. Which will make it abundantly clear, as if we didn’t already know, that Trump’s stimulus package for black America will be found lacking.

Can’t you just see it now: Jared Kushner throws a posh party this weekend, where he walks up to Donald Trump Jr., gives him a big, angry kiss and whispers, “I knew it was you, Don. You broke my heart … YOU BROKE MY HEART!!!”

There has been a long-running debate among political observers as to which of Trump’s children is the dumbest. Is it Eric and his constant justification of thewar against all them illegal Messicans? Is it Ivanka, who has managed to be so offensive that Marshalls (whose slogan might as well be, “I can’t believe I spilled this on my dress; wait, there’s a Marshalls on the way”) dropped her product line? Is it Tiffany Trump, the Judy Winslow of the family? Or is it endangered-species-killing, history-warping Trump Jr., whose own fiancee actually thought he might be descended from retarded people (her words, not mine)?

Today we have definitive proof that Trump Jr. has leaped ahead of the pack. He’s become the Fredo of the family, through sheer incompetence and by engaging in an act so brazenly stupid that it transcends betrayal and rests upon the hilltop of political suicide.

This past weekend, the New York Times reached out to Trump Jr. about an upcoming exclusive story about a meeting he attended on June 9, 2016. Trump Jr. claimed that the meeting was a big nothing burger; that he, Kushner and then-Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at the request of a mutual friend to possibly discuss “Russian-to-American adoption policy”—which is auto correct for “U.S. sanctions on Russia.”

Then, Monday night, the Times dropped another bombshell, reporting that not only had the Russian-lawyer meeting been about sharing information gathered by Russia to harm Hillary Clinton, but the Russians also wanted to share it with the Trump campaign, and Donnie Jr. knew that before taking the meeting. Just to clarify, taking aid, either financial or material, from a foreign power during a presidential campaign is totes illegal.

Mind you, the Times story was from sources in the White House who claimed knowledge of the email exchanges that set up this meeting. These are sources, not proof. Fredo Trump Jr. could have simply lawyered up (which he did) and shut up (which he didn’t), and the whole thing might have blown over until the next time his father tweeted something crazy. Instead, what does the namesake Trump do?

The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

To which Donald Trump Jr. responded minutes later:

“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

Even independent journalist Jared Yates Sexton, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, couldn’t believe it.

He had never seen these emails with his own eyes; investigators had been looking for them for over a year; Fredo Trump Jr. could’ve just denied the whole thing and called it #FakeNews (which is what he had been saying about Russian collusion all year). Instead he just blurts out all the damning information like he won something.

Fredo Jr. is the guy whose girlfriend says, “I hear you’ve been texting other women on your phone,” and he responds by saying, “Wrong! I can’t believe you’d say that! I was sending them dick pics,” and then posts them all over social media with a #GameBlouses hashtag.

Russia special investigator Robert Mueller must be looking at all this from his K Street office while doing his best Birdman right now.

Who should he go after first? Jared Kushner, who lied about the meeting on security clearance forms, which is against the law? Put more pressure on Paul Manafort, who, as a campaign manager, knew full well that financial or material aid from a foreign nation is against the law? Fredo Trump Jr., for being so blisteringly incompetent? Or, even better, Donald Trump, whose tweets after this meeting, in his building, suggest that more was exchanged with the Russian lawyer than just recipes and adoption gift certificates? So many options.

Fredo Trump Jr. has become a liability, and we know how Donald Trump treats his family. At some point—maybe not this year or next year, but sometime, and sometime soon—Ivanka Trump or Kushner is going to take Fredo Trump Jr. out on the lake for a conversation, and at least one of them ain’t coming back.

On All In With Chris Hayes, MSNBC Contributor Jason Johnson participated in a roundtable discussion on the first six months of the Trump administration with MSNBC host Joy Reid, Michelle Goldberg of Slate, Nicholas Confessore and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, investigative journalist Michael Isikoff and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin.

On the media coverage of the investigation into Russian interference in the election.

I was on my way to the Jon Ossoff watch party at a fancy Westin in North Atlanta when I got a call from a good colleague of mine. Somewhere between a black millennial and Gen Xer, he was someone who’d worked on campaigns in Georgia and had a pretty good feel for what was going on throughout Atlanta and the surrounding suburbs.

“That white boy ’bout to lose,” was the first thing he said.

At first I was kind of surprised: Most polls showed the Georgia special election to be close, with Democrat Ossoff performing reasonably well and sometimes even leading Republican Karen Handel. It was the most expensive congressional race in history, and I knew several Republicans who told me privately that Ossoff was going to pull off the upset.

However, with a few days on the ground and knowing the district, I expected Ossoff to lose in a close race, but hearing that sentiment from a campaign insider was unexpected. Yet it became a resounding theme, especially among the African-American political consultants and campaign insiders I spoke to. No matter what happened or how much money was spent, the racial dynamics of Georgia weren’t going to let a Democrat win in a red district.

Democratic armchair quarterbacks were throwing pretzels long before Ossoff’s 48 percent-to-52 percent loss to Handel was called on the cable news networks: The Democratic Party lacks a message; Jon Ossoff spent too much time talking about Trump; Jon Ossoff spent too little time talking about Trump; Jon Ossoff shoulda just kicked the field goal. Everyone seemed to know exactly what Atlanta Democrats should have done.

The truth is, the Republican Party had a 9 percent advantage in voter registration in the Georgia 6th. Hardworking local organizations got more than 129,000 people to early-vote, and more than 50,000 new voters registered between the April primary and the special election in June. But gerrymandering is a serious drug.

The Georgia 6th was drawn in a way to guarantee that a ham sandwich, a wet tablecloth, Team Rocket or a Margo Martindale clone will win any race so long as they have an “R” by their name. There was no “message” from Ossoff on how he was going to turn college-educated Republicans into Democratic special election voters. There is no cheat code to make up a 9 percent registration deficit that either Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton or JFK could have come up with to change the election results. Privately, most Republicans in Atlanta will acknowledge that Ossoff ran about as flawless a campaign as possible, given the circumstances, but he couldn’t overcome the structure of the district.

The Georgia special election demonstrates the limitations of the Democratic Party right now, as well as the weakness of the Republicans even in what are supposed to be safe districts. Republicans just spent $23 million to keep a congressional district that no Democrat has won in 40 years. That’s like McDonald’s spending millions to remind us they still sell hamburgers. If what you’re selling is any good, you shouldn’t have to spend that much to remind us.

However, while some outside the district will second-guess and decry what happened in the race as some larger indictment of the Democratic Party, most African-American consultants on the ground were not surprised. When it came to the Georgia 6th special election, black folks knew that, like Airbnb rates and The Bachelorette, the fix was in.

“White people gonna white.”

“I know my racist neighbors.”

“Ossoff left 10,000 black voters out there.”

In the South—even the “educated” suburban South of a teeming multicultural metropolis like Atlanta—racial dynamics and party dynamics overlap in inescapable ways. White people generally don’t vote for the Democratic Party in Georgia, or any other Southern state. The idea that a coalition of educated suburban whites would actually team up with black voters to send a message to Donald Trump from Georgia was a fantasy created by the blue screen and CGI of outside Democratic analysts who want a happy ending to the Trump narrative in eight months.

Earlier in the week, a middle-aged white woman in a heavily pro-Ossoff precinct called the police on me for simply reporting on a group of African-American canvassers in her neighborhood. Canvassers were threatened and spat on across the 6th District. The Democratic Party’s most reliable base of voters, African Americans remain the primary targets of voter intimidation, suppression and policy abuse, but the Democrats continue to spend millions of dollars chasing after mythical “moderate” Republicans and soccer moms.

This is not to suggest that African-American turnout alone would have won the Georgia 6th for the Democrats, but they spent about $25 million in that race. For that much money, they could’ve gotten one season out of LeBron James, and I’m pretty sure that’s equal to a 20 percent increase in black turnout.

Many consultants told me that the Ossoff campaign left much of the black-turnout work to outside groups and third parties, which is status quo in a regular election, but that’s not the game-changing strategy you need in the most expensive congressional race in American history.

If there’s any doubt about the value of tapping into the Southern black Democratic vote, just look at what happened six hours away in the South Carolina 5th District special election, which nobody was paying any attention to. There, quietly, the Democratic Party spent only $250,000 but tested out some experimental get-out-the-vote strategies for getting out the African-American vote.

Democrat Archie Parnell lost to Republican Ralph Norman by a mere 4 percentage points, 51 to 47 percent, in a district that went for Trump by 20 percentage points in November. What was the difference? Consistent and creative African-American turnout efforts by the Democratic candidate throughout the entire campaign led to—wait for it—incredible jumps in turnout! Politics can be a simple game when you actually target your own voters instead of someone else’s.

At the end of the night, when all networks had declared that Jon Ossoff lost the Georgia 6th congressional race, the watch-party room was still jubilant. Black, white, Asian, Latino; the room was the epitome of Atlanta in 2017, if not specifically Georgia’s 6th District. People were cheering, dancing and drinking long into the night. I only saw two people crying; everyone else was dancing to suburban hip-hop (lots of Usher and radio-edited T.I.; this is Atlanta, after all).

Apparently they missed the message from national Democrats that they were a bunch of failures. But maybe, just like the black consultants I talked to all throughout the day, the Ossoff revelers knew something that nobody else did. Ossoff’s supporters knew that they had raised millions of dollars and made the GOP sweat in places it never expected. African-American Democrats know that even amid the same old racial cleavages, the “City Too Busy to Hate” had made a smidgen of progress in spite of itself.

All along, people knew “That white boy ’bout to lose,” but at least this time, it looked as if he, and they, went down swinging.

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About Jason Johnson

Dr. Jason Johnson is a professor, political analyst and public speaker. Fresh, unflappable, objective, he is known for his ability to break down stories with wit and candor. Johnson is the author the book Political Consultants and Campaigns: One Day to Sell, a tenured professor in the School of Global Journalism & Communication at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland and Politics Editor at TheRoot.com. Dr. Johnson has an extensive public speaking and media background ranging from … [Read More...] about About Jason Johnson